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Portugal more or less declared bankruptcy yesterday. Here’s how the ECB responded today:

Worried about rising prices, the European Central Bank raised its benchmark interest rate for the first time since 2008 on Thursday, risking damage to weaker economies like Portugal, which only a day earlier became the third country to request an international bailout….The bank president, Jean-Claude Trichet, and other members of the governing council had warned repeatedly over the past month about the risk that higher oil prices would fuel a general increase in prices.

This is nuts. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. Surging oil prices are a supply and demand phenomenon. Oil prices aren’t going up because there’s too much money in circulation, they’re going up because supply is limited, there’s unrest in the Middle East, and demand keeps rising inexorably upward.

I have some sympathy for bond hawks who say that although bond prices aren’t currently showing any fear of either inflation or financial collapse, markets can turn quickly and it’s best to keep from ever getting to the point when that turn might happen. Still, a little more inflation right now would be a good thing, not a bad one, and economic growth would be a really good thing. Anything that gets in the way of growth is just begging for bigger trouble down the road. This panicky action from Trichet is a big mistake.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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